The new Fine Art Publishers.

 

In the Portobello Road market you will not only find interesting paintings and etchings. Occasionally it is also likely to find valuable photographs, such as those I will describe in the next two posts. It was a Friday morning, November the 8th, in one of the stalls under the marquee close to Portobello Green Market. I found a couple of photographs in antique gilt frames. At first I only acquired one, in which I believed to have recognised Bouguereau. Three weeks later I returned to that same stall, and was able to acquire the second one, on February 29th, 2020. 

Nowadays, since photography is perfectly embedded in the arts, it is difficult to think that at some point in history it could have been a threat to other artistic crafts. Since the second half of the 19th century, although printmaking techniques remained a popular creative medium among artists, traditional engraving and etching as methods to reproduce artistic artworks were becoming obsolete. One event was responsible for that crisis, the invention of photography. View from the Window at Le Gras (c. 1826) by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is considered as the first surviving camera photograph in history. Some engravers, seeking to survive, attempted to integrate it into their work, taking advantage of the invention of new reproductive processes and, naturally, of new photo-engraving techniques. One of those first companies to take advantage of photography was that of Adolphe Braun (1812-1877), who eventually became a major supplier of art reproductions, a business continued by his son Gaston Braun (1845-1928) with the assistance of Léon Clément, adopting the name Braun, Clément et Cie. I was lucky enough to catch one of their original photographic prints, perhaps an albumen print or a gelatin silver print mounted on board and dry stamped ‘1895 by Braun Clement & Co’. 

Braun Clément & Co was founded in 1889 and dissolved in 1910. The artwork captured was "Bacchante" (1894), an oil painting by William Bouguereau, nowadays in a private collection. More precisely, it was a hand painted photographic print in an original gilt wood and floral gesso Victorian picture frame. Colour was probably applied with watercolours and white gouache. The framework appeared to be a late 19th Century Louis XIII style revival composition frame.

 

Signature/ distinguishing marks: The photographic print is embossed with the Artist’s dry stamp in the bottom left and right corners: (left) ‘Copyright 1895 by Braun Clement & Co’; (right) ‘Propriété Artistique GA’. The measures are: Plate 3x5 inches (78 x 130 mm.), cardboard 4 x 6 inches (100 x 155 mm.).

Braun, Clement et Cie (Braun Clement & Co in UK) was a major supplier of reproductions of art by photography or engraving. They were the official photographers of the Louvre museum. After 1910 the name of the company became Braun et Cie.

 

Source: Rosenblum Editor, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography.

 

The albumen print technique was invented in 1850, and commonly used in the late nineteenth century. It consists of a photographic print made from paper coated with albumen. This technique became popular because it produced a rich sharp image. The process involves coating a sheet of paper with albumen (egg white), making the paper’s surface glossy and smooth. It is then coated in a solution of silver nitrate. The albumen and the silver nitrate form light-sensitive silver salts on the paper. When a glass negative is placed directly on the paper and exposed to light, it forms an image on the paper. The other technique I mentioned as a possibility, gelatine silver print, was the most usual means of making black and white prints from negatives. They are papers coated with a layer of gelatin which contains light sensitive silver salts. They were developed in the 1870's and by 1895 had generally replaced albumen prints because they were more stable, did not turn yellow and were simpler to produce. The most interesting thing about this studio photograph is that Braun Clement should have shot it shortly after Bouguereau finished his painting.

 

A dominant figure in French academicism.

 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a French painter, a dominant figure in his nation’s academic painting during the second half of the 19th century. Bouguereau received many honours in the 1860s and ’70s as his career progressed. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon for several decades and became for a time the most famous French painter of his day. He used in his paintings mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects. Beginning in the 1880s, Bouguereau increasingly found inspiration in Greco-Roman mythology. Here the artist placed his mythological fantasy in an idyllic, Arcadian landscape. In fact, he made his compositions in his studio, copying the landscape from the neighbouring French countryside. His major compositions from this period envisioned a realm of peace and harmony populated with legendary heroes, gods and demigods. While the artist explored a new, somewhat fantastical subject matter in the 1890s, his compositions still revealed decades of devotion and religious adherence to the principles of Academic painting. In April 1892 he travelled to London to prepare an exhibition of French artists at the Royal Academy. It was so successful that it became an annual event. As a proponent of official orthodoxy in painting, he played a major role in the exclusion of the artworks by the Impressionists and other experimental painters from the Salon.

 

This artwork, ‘Bacchante’ (1894), was acquired directly from the artist by Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, as ‘Automne’, in December 1894, and this studio photograph by Braun Clement was taken soon after the work’s completion.

 

     A description of the painting can be found in the 19^th Century European Art (Lot 428, 01 February 2019) catalogue from Sotheby's New York: “Greeting the viewer with a raised goblet of wine, this beautiful model revels in the iconographic tradition of Maenads, or Bacchantes, as envisioned by William Bouguereau’s distinctive imagination. These mythological women were frequent subjects among nineteenth century artists who favoured them for their intrinsic eroticism and ecstatic youthfulness. However, at the sober hand of Bouguereau, she is hardly a lascivious fury inebriated by wine.  Yet with her invitingly gracious demeanor, she is easily identified as a Dionysian devotee along with two unmistakable symbols: the ivy wreath on her head, a reminder of her connection to wine and revelry, and the thyrsus she holds in her right hand, a pinecone topped staff originating in Attic vase painting as a symbol of Bacchus.

 

     In April 1892, Bouguereau travelled to London to organize an exhibition of paintings by French artists at the Royal Academy. In addition to visiting museums, he inevitably frequented the galleries of Arthur Tooth (for whom Bouguereau painted this work) and Thomas McLean. The work of his English contemporaries must have made an impression upon him and particularly the iconic compositions of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Godward, whose meticulously researched depictions of the sun-drenched Mediterranean were populated by 'Victorians in Togas'. Trying his hand with the subject two years later in the present Bacchante, Bouguereau’s treatment is unmistakable. His naturalistic interpretation is rendered in heroic proportions, a secular goddess who implies an unbroken continuum of idealized women from antiquity to his own time.

 

     The painting belongs to a series the artist referred to as ‘fantasy paintings’, a theme that the artist established through earlier works that illustrate Classical narratives such as La jeunesse de Bacchus (1884, Private Collection, Paris) or Nymphes et Satyre  (1873, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown). The model, an Italian girl who frequently appears in Bouguereau’s compositions between 1894 and 1895, posed for several such “fantasies” including Prêtresse de Bacchus (1894, Private Collection), as well as Souvenir (1894, location unknown), and Le secret (1894, Private Collection, United States).

 

     Bacchante was widely popularized in the form of four photographs published by Braun & Clément, and the painting was reproduced in outline for an amusing advertisement for Mariani wine. In it, the amphora has been replaced by a bottle, with the accompanying motto written in Bouguereau’s hand: ‘as pleasant as it is salutary, Mariani wine lends health to the body and cheerfulness to the spirit’”.

Literature:

 

-Marius Vachon, W. Bouguereau, Paris, 1900, p. 158.

-"Annual Report," Bulletin of the DIA, Detroit, 1977-78, vol. 56, no. 5, p. 277, illustrated fig. 12.

-Mark Steven Walker, "William-Adolphe Bouguereau: A Summary Catalogue of the Paintings," William-Adolphe Bouguereau, L'Art Pompier, exh. cat., Borghi & Co., New York, 1991, p. 74.

-Damien Bartoli and Frederick C. Ross, William Bouguereau, Catalogue Raisonné of his Painted Works, New York, 2010, p. 294, no. 1894/13, illustrated p. 295; and in the revised 2014 edition, p. 294, no. 1894/13, illustrated p. 295.

But the story behind our second photograph, the one I initially dismissed, and especially that of its creator, turned out to be even more intriguing and murky, and will be the subject of my next post.